World Gone Wrong: Thomas Friedman's World Gone Flat and Pascale Casanova's World Republic against the Multitudes of 'Oceania'

This essay tracks the poetics and geopolitics of a ”world gone wrong” in two influential forms of the global system articulated as a cultural-political dominant: one, Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which is Anglo-American and post-imperial in its overall operation, tropes, stories, and tactics; and the other is Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (La Republique Mondiale des Lettres), which is seemingly cosmopolitan yet Franco-centric in its over-extended model of how ”the world republic of (literary) letters” works as cultural capital and ”literary domination” under postcolonialism from Maori New Zealand to decolonizing Ireland and Nobel Prize-seeking South Korea. As an alternative model of globalization more adequate to our ”worlding” situation, region, and time, the essay turns, by way of counter-gesture move, towards more Asia/Pacific-based modes of cultural emergence surging up across ”Oceania” as theorized and enacted, among others, by Epeli Hau'ofa, the Tongan writer at the University of South Pacific. The transdisciplinary pedagogy and interventions into globalization discourse via ”worlding” would help envision and shape what such a global/local, transnational, and borderlands concept of regionalization can do to counter the reign of the neo-liberal world republic of domination and inequity.